Challenges of community participation in tourism planning in developing countries

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the challenges faced by the community in participating in sustainable tourism in developing countries. The research was conducted using a systematic literature study on scientific articles indexed by Scopus from 2018–2022 with the theme of community participation in tourism planning. Inclusion criteria are articles from developing countries determined by the International Monetary Fund. The findings show that the constraints on community participation can be categorized into three main groups: operational, structural, and cultural. Operational constraints include lack of access to information, lack of efficient decision-making structures, lack of discussion platforms, lack of knowledge, and lack of transparency and accountability. Structural constraints identified include lack of access to planning experts, weak community development, lack of budget, lack of education, and unsuitable policy and governance. Finally, cultural barriers include the history of colonialism, community awareness, mistrust, power disparities, unequal distribution of costs and benefits, and conflict of interests. Governments and sustainable tourism operators must systematically address these issues to encourage broader community participation in tourism.

Keywords:

• community participation
• tourism planning
• tourism
• developing countries
• challenges

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Community participation in tourism is essential to support tourism because it provides sustainable benefits for the community’s survival, especially for people in developing countries. However, this study shows that community participation in tourism is still a challenge for developing countries. There are operational, structural, and cultural obstacles that hinder community participation. Most tourism planning is only concerned with developing facilities or infrastructure to facilitate physical access, while information access for local people in tourism planning is not provided. Community participation is also not optimal due to weak community development and distrust. Tourism organizers in developing countries must encourage participation by facilitating bureaucracy and providing access to information for local communities to participate. They also need to involve NGOs as bridges for the community with other stakeholders, ensuring destination ownership for local communities, providing budgetary support, and campaigning for awareness of sustainable tourism for the local community.

1. Introduction

Tourism development creates a positive and negative impact on communities. Tourism can stimulate local economies; promote employment for local people, and generate income for regions (Liu & Wall, 2006). On the other hand, tourism development may also generate adverse effects on tourism, such as criminality, higher living cost for the community, resentment of host communities towards tourists, and low life quality of residents (Ap & Crompton, 1993). These negative impacts of tourism may indicate an absence of planning (Zhong et al., 2011) or a lack of community participation in tourism planning (Lamberti et al., 2011). Indeed, the concept of tourism planning emerges as the response to the harmful effects of the rapid development of tourism. The concept emerged academically in the 1970s and was formally acknowledged by UNWTO that tourism development should be planned in 1994 (Caliskan, 2021). Beneficial partnerships are essential for tourism planning (Wanner & Pröbstl-Haider, 2019).

Awareness of the importance of community participation in tourism planning has encouraged developing countries to start paying attention to this aspect of tourism. However, when developing countries seek to improve themselves through better public participation, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The threat of the spread of the virus prompted tourism centers to close and tourism planning efforts to be delayed (Mao et al., 2021). Even after the pandemic ended in almost all countries in May 2022, international arrivals were still 30%-45% below 2019 values (UNWTO, 2022). The impact of the pandemic on the tourism sector is worst experienced by developing countries because they are slower to vaccinate (UNWTO, 2021). Governments in various countries develop national tourism strategies to improve the severely affected situation (Collins-Kreiner & Ram, 2021). Some parties, however, view the pandemic as an essential opportunity to create a more sustainable society through the development of inclusive tourism (Pardo & Ladeiras, 2020; Romagosa, 2020). Developed countries like New Zealand have taken steps like this (Carr, 2020). Meanwhile, developing countries face various implementation dilemmas (Cahyadi & Newsome, 2021).

Community participation in tourism planning has been vital (Lamberti et al., 2011). Community participation will result in positive behavior towards tourism. As maintain, thriving tourism industry can happen if community support for tourism is excellent. In contrast, if residents’ aspirations are not included in tourism planning, hostilities of tourism development may occur, and these may harm the industry itself (Zhang et al., 2006).

According to Gunn and Var (2020), tourism management should include planning. Consequently, such plans will help achieve good economic impacts and visitor satisfaction. Nevertheless, although the essence of tourism planning is recognized widely, planning is often not included in developing countries (Matiku et al., 2021; Yanes et al., 2019).

Community participation in tourism planning was first developed formally in the Manila Declaration of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2021). The Manila Declaration emphasizes that tourist satisfaction must not be detrimental to local communities social and economic interests and that tourism activities should improve people’s working capacity (UNWTO, 2022). Since then, tourism planning policies must be developed multi-level, with the national peak framework. A tourism planning hierarchy starts at the local level and progresses to regional and national levels (Llupart, 2022). So, the discourse of community participation in tourism is not new. Its placement in the concept of sustainable tourism developed in the 1990s (Butler, 1999) reinforces what was agreed internationally in the 1980s.

Theoretically, community participation in tourism planning can even be drawn up to the 1970s when the discourse of participatory development and empowerment emerged (Giampiccoli & Mtapuri, 2012). Since then, several models of community participation in tourism have emerged (Jamal & Getz, 1995; Okazaki, 2008; Pinel, 1999). For example, Okazaki (2008) developed a model involving eight levels of participation ranging from manipulation, therapy, informing, consultation, placation, partnership, delegated power, and citizen control. Participation in planning is at the partnership level. The Okazaki (2008) model is built on social capital theory. Another theory that has been used to formulate a model of community participation in tourism is the theory of collaboration (Jamal & Getz, 1995) which is closely related to power relations in society (Reed, 1997). The bottom line is that community participation in tourism has a solid theoretical and formal foundation. The fact that this process is complicated even today indicates that there are inhibiting factors that need to be identified and addressed.

Many literature reviews and meta-analyses have been conducted regarding the factors inhibiting community participation in the general context (Talò et al., 2014) and specifically in community-based tourism (Zielinski et al., 2020). However, no one has reviewed these factors in a more contemporary context, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. The current research has novelty in terms of time.

This paper reviews tourism literature, especially those focused on third-world countries’ contexts. It examines the challenges and demanding situations of developing countries in creating and implementing the plans, particularly the challenges of the community’s involvement in tourism planning. To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review of scientific publications between 2018 and 2022. The time allows for a deeper understanding of how community participation in tourism planning in developing countries is carried out and what factors hinder this community participation. Developing countries are defined according to the International Monetary Fund with levels of per capita income, export diversification, and a degree of integration into the global financial system that is lower than the average for all countries in the world (IMF, 2022).

The structure of the paper will be as follows. Following the introduction, the next section will present the materials and methods of this research. It includes defining research questions, the search process, and analysis execution. After that, we discuss the results, followed by the discussion of the research findings, and then briefly explains the practical implications of the operational, structural, and cultural barriers in community participation for sustainable tourism development. The last section summarizes the findings and draws limitations.

2. Materials and methods

The method used to conduct this research consists of three phases: (i) the definition of the research question, (ii) the definition of the search process, and (iii) the execution of the analysis. The following describes each phase in detail.

3. Definition of research questions

The following questions were drawn based on a top-down approach to developing this review. The community-based tourism literature divides tourism’s success and inhibiting factors into three groups: operational, structural, and cultural (Zielinski et al., 2018; Gohori & van der Merwe, 2021; Tosun, 2000). Therefore, the research questions in this literature review are: (i) What operational factors hinder people’s participation in tourism in developing countries? (ii) What structural factors hinder people’s participation in tourism in developing countries? Moreover, (iii) what cultural factors hinder people’s participation in tourism in developing countries?

4. Definition of the search process

This review was carried out by considering all papers published between 2018 and 2022 to keep the findings up to date. The research process is carried out on the Scopus database because it is the best scientific database. Filtered queries include author, abstract, and keywords.

At the initial stage, the keywords used in the title, abstract, “community participation,” AND “tourism planning.” However, only 59 articles were obtained. Restrictions in 2018 and above even only get 25 articles. When we limit it to developing countries according to the IMF classification (2018), we only get 11 documents. After reading the abstract and the article’s content, we only found four articles relevant to the context of community participation in tourism planning.

Then we used the keywords “community involvement” AND “tourism planning” and produced four articles, one of which was the same as the 11 existing documents. After reading, there are no articles relevant to the context of community participation in tourism planning. We also use the keywords “local participation” AND “tourism planning.” Two new studies were added in this process. Four new articles were added, further exploring several related keywords using the Google Scholar database.

This result is quite reasonable considering that previous research by Zielinski et al. (2018) only found 63 articles on inhibiting factors for community-based tourism in developing countries, with 30 published between 2010–2018. On average, only about three publications per year will be obtained; for five years, it can only be expected that there will be 15 publications. Research by Zielinski et al. (2018) covers a broad spectrum, where community participation in tourism planning is only a tiny part of the spectrum of community-based tourism.

5. Execution of analysis

The analysis was executed by performing a content analysis on the paper’s abstract. The paper’s aspects of community participation were extracted and grouped based on the research’s categories of barriers to participation.

6. Results

Table 1 below systematizes all the contributions of the reviewed researchers. The small amount of research that we have managed to compile is unexpected. At least this literature can be partly due to the decision to be specific in using keywords. Since we focused on community participation or involvement, we did not take more general keywords such as participation and stakeholder involvement. Likewise, the keyword tourism planning yields fewer results than the more general concept, namely tourism development. However, the small quantity provides an opportunity to explore more deeply each developing country context that has been studied. The country distribution in the above review is attractive because no country is the same. Although there were no representatives from the Americas, there were representatives from Europe, which rarely had developing countries (Wanner & Pröbstl-Haider, 2019).

Table 1. Barriers to community participation in tourism planning

No	Authors (Date of publication)	Country analyzed	Methods used	Main results
1	Bello (2021)	Malawi	Content analysis	Limited access to tourism information and tourism planning experts. Lacks an appropriate decision-making structure for the efficient flow of management decisions to local communities.
2	Boonwanno et al. (2022)	Thailand	SWOT analysis	Weak development of local people in the management of community-based tourism.
3	Lekaota (2019)	South Africa	Survey research, descriptive analysis	Lack of budget for education and training.
4	Mansor et al. (2019)	Malaysia	Thematic analysis	Lack of platform for tourism planning discussion between government and developer with local communities.
5	Rastegar et al., 2021)	Iran	Netnographic research	Lacked knowledge of any formal processes
6	Sarr et al. (2020)	Senegal	Case study	History of colonialism
7	Adebayo and Butcher (2021)	Nigeria	Qualitative research	Community awareness, education, trust, transparency, and accountability
8	Kala and Bagri (2018)	India	Qualitative research	Felt debarred and uncertain that any of their opinions would be deliberated (power disparities)
9	Nguyen et al., 2020)	Vietnam	Qualitative content analysis	Unsuitable governance and policy protect local culture, and unequal distribution of tourism benefits and costs (economic, social, and cultural).
10	Wanner and Pröbstl-Haider (2019)	Southeast Europe (mainly developing countries)	Case study	Low awareness and domination or conflict of interest

7. Discussion

Tosun (2000) developed three barriers to stakeholder participation in tourism development: operational, structural, and cultural. Hartley and Wood (2005) add that personal barriers can be combined with cultural and personal barriers (Wanner & Pröbstl-Haider, 2019). Our research provides several constraints that match each type of barrier. Operational constraints can be found in the form of a lack of access to information and the absence of efficient decision-making structures (Bello, 2021), lack of discussion platforms (Mansor et al., 2019), lack of knowledge (Rastegar et al., 2021), and lack of transparency and accountability (Adebayo & Butcher, 2021).

The root of these operational barriers lies in the centralized structure standard in developing countries public administration. A centralized solid structure of public administration has been reported as a central concern in emergent countries (Tosun & Timothy, 2001). This centralization has led to a domination of power among the elites. In Turkey, for example, as the central government is the foundation of power, thus, local institutions are applied by those in power to carry out the priorities of the central government. In other words, they are obligated to obey all decisions the central government makes (Tosun & Timothy, 2001).

The centralized structures in third-world countries lead to a situation in which the election winner states the right to make all the decisions (Tosun, 2000). The situation brings a lacking of implementation of a participatory tourism approach (D.J. Timothy, 2002). In emergent countries, the inclination toward the ignorance of the voices of local people is encouraged by fears from the elite that the locals can use their numerical power to keep their political interests safe by capacity or intimidation (Tosun, 2000).

An instance of how control is focused on the elites’ influences is what occurred in Java, Indonesia. On Java Island, the communities show high respect for their leaders; therefore, ignoring leaders is considered impolite (Rizal, 2020). This condition is ‘as if to bring rights to the leaders to create any decisions on behalf of everybody. The tradition will make the community not have many choices besides accepting what is determined by the leader. Disagreeing will be considered a sign of disrespect.

Decentralizing tourism planning from the national to local level using effective legal and administrative systems is needed for the community to gain power (Zielinski et al., 2018). Decentralization is not an easy thing to do, primarily because of its political nature. For example, even though the centralized structure has been changed to decentralization in Indonesia, the process has been challenging. Various issues, such as personnel, funding management, and taxation, have been unsolved (Alm et al., 2001). However, after two decades of decentralization efforts, the situation is improving. Regional disparities and spatial fragmentation continue to decline between parts of the country (Talitha et al., 2020).

Structural barriers found in the research reviewed included lack of access to planning experts (Bello, 2021), weak community development (Boonwanno et al., 2022), lack of budget (Lekaota, 2019), lack of education (Adebayo & Butcher, 2021), and unsuitable policy and governance (Nguyen et al., 2020).

The root of the structural barriers lies in the tension between those who create the plan. This pressure is frequently related to difficulties in asking those people to agree that participatory tourism development is a suitable method in third-world countries. In this case, the approval of participatory tourism development may very much be reliant on the presence of solid Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that argue that participatory development is a right of the local community in destinations (Tosun, 2000).

Tourism planning in emergent countries is mainly focused on supply and market. Tosun and Timothy (2001) maintain that infrastructure and building such physical improvements as hotels have reinforced planning in underdeveloped countries. Tourism planning only concerns with the opening of the new branch of hotels or refining transportation infrastructure to ease access. There is an inefficient use of inadequate resources and the use of development that prioritizes economic development. The impacts of tourism development on the social, cultural, and environmental areas are ignored.

This general practice of planning in underdeveloped nations that ignores local people (Tosun & Timothy, 2001) may bring problems in applying planning. Consequently, a massive break between planning and practice cannot be avoided (Lai et al., 2006). Tosun and Timothy (2001) maintain that tourism planning in underdeveloped countries must obey appropriate planning methods that consider their conditions, such as socio-cultural conduct. As Tosun and Timothy (2001, p. 358) say, “There is no magic checklist for an appropriate or improper approach to tourism development planning.”

Cultural barriers in the literature include the history of colonialism (Sarr et al., 2020) and community awareness (Adebayo & Butcher, 2021; Wanner & Pröbstl-Haider, 2019). Other cultural barriers include mistrust (Adebayo & Butcher, 2021), power disparities (Kala & Bagri, 2018; Wanner & Pröbstl-Haider, 2019), unequal distribution of costs and benefits (Nguyen et al., 2018), and conflict of interests (Wanner & Pröbstl-Haider, 2019).

Eshliki and Kaboudi (2012) maintain that there are some obstacles to tourism planning, such as boredom, low level of knowledge, awareness of the local population, and religious sensitivity. While according to D. J. Timothy (1999), local tradition is another barrier to tourism participation. Thus, these concerns require planning to increase local sensitivity and improve development (Ghaderi & Henderson, 2012). Cultural reactions might occur without paying attention to local sensitivity (Tosun & Jenkins, 1996).

This adverse cultural reaction never happened in Malaysia. In this country, because Islam is vital for residents, there are possible conflicts between Muslim populations and non-Muslim visitors (Henderson, 2003). In this circumstance, those involved in the Malaysian industry must understand the conditions, be aware of religious sensitivity, and help teach tourists about the problem. There is also room for consultations with religious leaders and local communities on codes of ethics and demonstration places such as shrines and mosques as tourist attractions (Henderson, 2003).

Furthermore, cultural barriers to planning implementation include the problem of limited knowledge and low awareness of local people (Tosun 2000). Research in Indonesiaisan example of how powerful political and cultural traditions created challenges for participation. The concept of Javanese control and power that demand high respect for influential people or those with high social positions has created ordinary people to accept their decisions without an opportunity to ask (D. J. Timothy, 1999). Reisinger and Turner (1997) claim that while authority has a decision, people should follow without question. In this case, ordinary people should accept the decision, no matter what (D. J. Timothy, 1999).

Regarding this limited knowledge, Mosse (2001) states that the voices of local people and their understanding of plans and problems are not addressed through participation. On the contrary, the understanding of local people is shaped mainly by those in power. In this case, negotiations took place between staff and critical village leaders on behalf of the villagers (Mosse, 2001). Indeed, local knowledge is basically about “collaborative products,” which effectively hides discussions between villagers and project staff. Thus, native knowledge is what the plan can deliver to the community.

There appears to be no difference between research after 2017 and research before that year in developing countries (Akama, 2002; Dogra & Gupta, 2012; Hatipoglu et al., 2016; Kanjuraman & Hussin, 2016; Ladkin & Bertramini, 2002). However, one factor does not appear to be present in research in developed countries (Blackstock, 2005; Dodds, 2007; Salvatore et al., 2018; Zarokosta & Koutsouris, 2014), namely the experience of colonialism. Most developing countries have a history of colonialism by countries that are now classified as developed countries, especially countries from different continents (e.g., Africa and Asia colonized by Europe). This discourse should have disappeared in the present time because colonialism has long been lost, but in fact, this discourse appears in the research of Sarr et al. (2020) in Senegal.

In his research on local community participation in tourism planning in protected areas, Sarr et al. (2020) use a social representational approach. This approach is rarely used in tourism studies (Hadinejad et al., 2019). Through a social representational approach, Sarr et al. (2020) revealed three groups of people about participated: refusal groups, support groups, and those who wanted to leave the destination. The main reason for the opposing groups is that tourism is nothing but a new form of colonialism.

European colonialism and tourism are two things that are very closely related in the history of developing countries in Asia and Africa (Linehan et al., 2020). Colonialism brought the arrival of foreign people with different languages and races to an area, and some of these people came to admire the beauty of nature while marginalizing local people. For people in developing countries who are multicultural but have clear localizations, the intrusion of foreign people with excellent power relations will cause conflict. Indonesia can be a clear example. The New Order government’s policy to transmigrate Javanese people to Kalimantan has caused prolonged conflict in a highly diverse country (Simpson, 2021). Sarr et al. (2020) did not address this issue of colonialism with tourism in their findings, but this issue has been raised in the context of tourism marketing by Ngo et al., 2020) and tourism management by Sène-Harper and Séye (2019).

In the traumatic perception of the local community after colonialism, foreigners who come to a destination for a vacation will one day take over the place and get rid of them. Local people do not tolerate this and do not want it to be negotiated. They do not want to be involved in tourism planning because they reject tourism. If tourism is forced, they will become a group that will increasingly distrust the government and foreigners. They may not be able to go to extremes, but they can give tourists an unpleasant impression, leading to tourism failure. The failure of tourism is their wish, and in this way, they achieve victory over their land rights.

These post-colonial constraints are more severe than operational and structural constraints. The government needs to consider teaching people who do not want to participate rather than people who want to participate but are constrained by operational, structural, and cultural problems. Without awareness of the dissident groups, they can lead to problems in tourism failure.

8. Practical implications

It is necessary to take systematic steps taken by the government and tourism organizers to overcome the obstacles that hinder community participation in tourism planning. If currently, most tourism planning is only concerned with the development of facilities or infrastructure to facilitate physical access, now access to information for local communities in tourism planning also needs to be provided. Regular and familial discussion platforms must be organized by involving the government, developers, and local communities.

Building trust, transparency, and accountability require a bureaucracy that is simple and easy to understand and pass through by local communities. The government and tourism management should also involve NGOs as a bridge for the community and other stakeholders. NGOs can become tourism planning experts needed by the community and intermediaries that increase the efficiency of the flow of managerial decisions and feedback in the planning system. NGOs will also become advocates for marginalized groups (Moscardo, 2018).

Local community ownership of the destination must be ensured through written agreements and certificates of title/customary rights and the placement of local people in tourism management. Formal written agreements will encourage community acceptance, which initially considers tourism development a new type of colonization and an attempt to seize their property rights. They will know that they are the owners of the culture and ecology of the destination (Huong et al., 2020). Meanwhile, placement requires training and education for local communities regarding tourism management (Idris, Purnomo & Rahmawati, 2021) and capital. Therefore, budgetary support needs to be provided for the capacity building of local communities.

Sustainable tourism awareness campaigns for local communities must be carried out reasonably and acceptably. A house-to-house campaign with a face-to-face system will significantly help build equal social relations to reduce the problem of power disparities. During this visit, NGOs, governments, or developers can describe the benefits and risks of sustainable tourism. Profits and risks that are distributed equally will create a sense of fairness that reduces the risk of conflicts of interest in the future.

9. Conclusion

This study’s results indicate that operational, structural, and cultural aspects hinder community participation. Barriers categorized as operational barriers are lack of access to information, lack of efficient decision-making structures, lack of discussion platforms, lack of knowledge, and lack of transparency and accountability. In contrast, structural limitations are the lack of access to planning experts, weak community development, lack of budget, education, and unsuitable policy and governance. Finally, cultural barriers include a history of colonialism, community awareness, mistrust, power disparities, unequal distribution of costs and benefits, and conflict of interests. These barriers have hindered community participation in tourism planning in developing countries.

This study has many limitations that are typical of review research. The main limitation is the filtering process, which only uses two keyword pairs. The literature can use other keywords, but because the researcher did not consider them, the literature was not reviewed. Future research should consider using other keywords and focusing on specific contexts, for example, post-pandemic tourism planning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Dian Yulie Reindrawati

Dian Yulie Reindrawati The researcher works in Indonesia with a research topic in the field of sustainable tourism as a subject of interest. In line with this research, the researcher also conducted various studies on threats to tourism sustainability, local people’s perceptions of tourism, rural tourism development, and poverty alleviation programs, especially for women.